1. This essay is substantially as read to the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge in November 1963 and to the Jowett Society at Oxford in February 1964.
2. Most of this section is highly derivative; sources of particular importance are Gilbert Ryle, “Ordinary Language,” Philosophical Review (1953), and Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” Inquiry (1958).
3. Bernard Williams, review Sense and Sensibilia, by J. L. Austin, Oxford Magazine, December 1962.
4. This is unfair to Flew’s later views, but perhaps not to the view expressed in New Essays in Philosophical Theology.
1. Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994); Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Times Books, 1995).
2. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959).
3. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), 345.
4. The German title of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1951) could more literally have been translated as “anxiety in culture,” but the sense of culture was the anthropologist’s rather than Arnold’s.
5. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), originally published 1904–5.
6. W. B. Carnochan, The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).
7. Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 155ff.
8. J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London: Dent, 1910), 261n.
1. I acknowledge with pleasure the criticism of the first version of this chapter that I received from Nancy Rosenblum, Martin Golding, and Ian Shapiro. I have paid them what I hope is the compliment of silently amending my text where they have shown it to be unclear, but I have not restructured my argument nor altered contentious claims. Our readers and I will learn more if I offer my critics a good fat target than if I beat a premature retreat.
2. It thus follows Alan Ryan, “Communitarianism: The Good, the Bad, and the Muddly,” Dissent, Summer 1989, 350–54; and Charles Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal Communitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum, 159–82 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Supervising Dr. Mimi Bick’s D.Phil. dissertation, “The Liberal-Communitarian Debate: A Defense of Holistic Individualism” (University of Oxford, 1987), taught me a great deal. For an excellent overview of the subject, see Will Kyrnlicka, Community, Individuality and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
3. Taylor’s view that “the heirs of Mill” have forgotten the legacy of Humboldt is, in this view, quite wrong (“Cross-Purposes,” 163). Rather, recent American liberals have forgotten the legacy of Mill.
4. But see L. A. Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan, 153–74 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), on the sociologically sophisticated character of French liberalism early in the nineteenth century too. The Oxford D.Phil. dissertation of my former student Avital Simchoni, “The Social and Political Thought of the English Idealists” (University of Oxford, 1980), is uniquely illuminating on the politics of the English Idealists.
5. John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill [cited as CW], ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 10:117–63.
6. L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London: Longman, Green, 1911); Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
7. Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London, Macmillan, 1958 [1899]), 59–62; T. H. Green, The Principles of Political Obligation, in The Philosophical Works of Thomas Hill Green [cited as PW], ed. R. L. Nettleship (London, Macmillan, 1894), 2:522–23.
8. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1874]), 39n.
9. John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, CW 9: chaps. 12, 18; Bradley, Ethical Studies, 36–41.
10. Green, PW 1:297–98.
11. Green, Principles of Political Obligation, PW 2:512–21; conversely, Bosanquet shows a more conservative Idealist agreeing with some of On Liberty, disagreeing with much else, and always claiming that Mill’s foundations are flawed (Philosophical Theory of the State, 61–65).
12. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, book 6, chap. 2, sec. 3, CW 8:840–41.
13. John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” CW 10:215–16, 228, 238.
14. Mill, Examination of Hamilton, chap. 26, CW 9:452.
15. Though it bulks larger than that for Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1–11.
16. As I argued in Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London, Macmillan, 1970), chap. 13.
17. Hobhouse, Liberalism, 54–55; T. H. Green, “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” PW 3:365–86.
18. Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Social Reconstruction (London: Allen and Unwin, 1916), 11–13.
19. Green, Principles of Political Obligation, PW 2:451–54.
20. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), part 1.
21. Mill, “Coleridge,” CW 10:134–36.
22. Mill, System of Logic, CW 8:919–20.
23. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, CW 19:535–39.
24. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, CW 18:276.
25. Émile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957); Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 264–76.
26. The detachability of commitment from method leads Richard Rorty to recommend that we just dispense with philosophical “foundations”; even he admits that we shall find it helpful to engage in the philosophical “articulation” of our commitments; see Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1:178.
27. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London, Fontana, 1985), chap. 10.
28. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 495ff.
29. Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 2.
30. John Rawls, “A Theory of Justice, Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 215–35.
31. Bick relies on three paired distinctions: between “ontology and advocacy” as a general organizing distinction, between “atomists” and “holists” in ontology, and between “individualists” and “collectivists” in advocacy. I am uneasy about ontology, so I stick with the distinction between methodological-cum-conceptual issues on the one hand and prescriptive issues on the other. There is, I hope, nothing much at stake here.
32. Taylor, “Cross-Purposes,” 169.
33. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 266–68.
34. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Modern Library, 1951), 90–91.
35. Alasdair Maclntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London, Duckworth, 1990), makes much of authority, and thus of those who exercise it, but less of the community of the faithful who sustain that authority.
36. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (London, Duckworth, 1981), 114–21.
37. Charles Taylor argues that social, political, and psychological theories have a “value slope” because they point out the ways in which people get what they want; he agrees, of course, that the critic may say they want the wrong things or get what they want at too high a price (“Neutrality in Political Science,” in The Philosophy of Social Explanation, ed. Alan Ryan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973], 75–77).
38. Maclntyre, After Virtue, 243–45.
39. Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State, 3–9; Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (Boston, Beacon Press, 1970), chap. 4; Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Philosophical Papers 1:197–202.
40. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
41. This would, in my view, allow an approach to abortion that was sensitive to moral convictions—for example, by forbidding abortion based on sex selection, by providing plenty of room for those who conscientiously objected to performing abortions to keep well away from the whole business—while allowing ready access to abortion in cases of hardship. It would not be very hospitable to treating the issue as a clash between a mother’s right to choose and a fetus’s right to life; cf. Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
42. The British Public Order Acts allow the police to prevent marches and demonstrations that pose a threat to the peace, and allow local authorities to impose restrictions, amounting to prohibition, on such demonstrations in a way that U.S. courts would find unconstitutional (Geoffrey Robertson, Freedom, the Individual, and the Law [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990], 66–76).
1. I am grateful to the participants in the Charlottesville conference that resulted in the book from which this chapter is taken for many very instructive comments.
2. He represented his employment at the East India Company as a form of not too mindless drudgery that gave him enough spare time to write; seeing that, by the end of his career, he occupied a position of much the same importance as a permanent secretary for the colonies, this was unduly dismissive.
3. Biographically, one perhaps should take into account Mill’s view that as an irrevocable contract whose terms were profoundly disadvantageous to women, marriage was a form of slavery; objections to Mormons having lots of quasi slaves on the part of people who thought it fine to have one each would have cut less ice with Mill than with most of his contemporaries.
4. Consider Mugabe’s theft of the parliamentary and presidential elections in Zimbabwe; if it were possible to remove him “surgically”—as I do not for one moment imagine that it is—this would not be forcing Zimbabweans to be free in the sense at issue here, but analogous to the case of the hostage taker. It might, of course, be the case that if one asked the people of Zimbabwe whether they wished to be saved from Mugabe by outside invasion, they would answer that they did not; then they would be in the position of having been forced to be free. Analogies with Serbia and Iraq are there for the drawing.
5. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6. This is a fairly simple-minded thought in the following sense: the Europeans had such a police force in the form of NATO, and they did not use it. They could and should have used it; first to ensure that Croatia did not become an independent state before it had put in place measures to protect its Serb minority (whose memories of World War II do not incline them to trust a Croat government), second to ensure that neither Croatia nor Serbia set about ruining the lives of the Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzogovina, and third to ensure that Serbia did not behave abominably in Kosovo. European governments could not bring themselves to act; the squeamishness that made them feel the horrors of what was happening also made them reluctant to get their own people killed. World War I having started in the streets of Sarajevo, so to speak, their fears were not absurd, but under the circumstances, they were cowardly. So having a police force is no use without the willingness to use it.
7. I hasten to point out that I go much further than Mill does in “A Few Words on Non-Intervention.” Mill’s line was that it was up to the oppressed to throw off their oppression and that outsiders ought not to do it for them; the British had no obligation to help the Hungarians turf out the Austrian monarchy. However, if the Austrian government were to rely on Russia to act in its old role as the gendarme of Europe, the British could come in on the side of the Hungarians. This is an argument to be handled with kid gloves; Gertrude Himmelfarb used to like it because she thought it justified the Vietnam War, but one can imagine the Bertrand Russell fan club thinking with equal warrant that it justified Russian intervention on the side of the Vietcong—indigenous revolutionaries oppressed by a South Vietnamese government sustained by American power. Those of us who dislike talk of sovereignty do not much like treating nations as anything but a term of convenience; for us, the question is not who is involved but whether one can do something effective to establish a nonbrutal, and preferably a nonbrutal and minimally liberal, regime. The trouble with the brightest and the best is that they think it is easier to achieve than it is; hence the caution apparent in the paper.
1. R. M. Hare, Applications of Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1972), 1–3.
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 188, 727–28.
3. Ibid., chap. 13.
4. G.W.F. Hegel, introduction to The Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941).
5. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1954).
6. Walter Kaufmann seems to me to plead too hard for such an interpretation in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950).
7. Georges Sorel, “Apology for Violence,” app. 2 in Reflections on Violence (New York: Collier, 1961).
8. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1965); Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
9. As was argued by Regis Debray, Revolution within the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).
10. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, 539–58 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
11. John Harris, “ ‘Non-Violent’ Violence,” chap. 2 in Violence and Responsibility (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
12. John Dunn, Modern Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 204ff.
13. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 56.
14. Ibid., 84–87.
15. Anthony Giddens, “Power in the Writings of Talcott Parsons,” chap. 10 in Studies in Social and Political Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1977).
16. George Kateb stresses the extent to which political action in Arendt’s sense of the term is a violent business that often eventuates in harm to a good many people (Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, and Evil [Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983], 38–40). This is a proper emphasis; not the least of one’s difficulties in understanding On Violence is that of squaring its account of politics with the enthusiasm for Machiavelli expressed in The Human Condition. This paragraph is only about On Violence and does not pretend to be an adequate account of Arendt’s views more generally considered.
17. Ted Honderich, Violence for Equality (New York: Routledge, 1989). See also C.A.J. Coady, “The Morality of Terrorism,” Philosophy 60 (January 1985): 47–69.
18. As argued some years ago in Frank Parkin, Inequality and Political Order (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1971).
19. Honderich, Violence for Equality, 187–210; Harris, Violence and Responsibility, chap. 2; Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 103.
20. Harris, Violence and Responsibility, 21–23.
21. The force of this varies a good deal according to whether writers think that there is something especially evil about violent methods; Honderich and Coady plainly represent different views of this issue.
22. Arendt, On Violence, 45–48.
23. This is plainly the proper interpretation of Hobbes’s account of political obligation; see Brian Barry, “Warrender and His Critics,” in Hobbes and Rousseau, ed. M. Cranston and R. S. Peters, 36–38 (London: Macmillan, 1972).
24. Joseph de Maistre, Works, trans. and ed. J. Lively (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 192.
25. Arendt, On Violence, 80.
26. Though Honderich takes the simplicity of the IRA’s aims much more for granted than I would (Violence for Equality, 198–99).
27. R. M. Hare, “The Lawful Government,” in Applications of Moral Philosophy, 84ff.
28. H.L.A. Hart, “Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment,” in Punishment and Responsibility: Essay in the Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 1–27.
29. In 1986, there were 61 sectarian killings in Ulster, and 91 in 1987, but in 1988 there were 332 murders in Washington, D.C., whose population is less than a third of the province’s.
30. The best account of the Baader-Meinhof gang is Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977), 227–40.
31. Carl Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1954); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958).
32. St. Augustine, The City of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 139.
33. John Simpson and Jana Bennett, The Disappeared (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985).
34. Hugo Young, One of Us (London: Macmillan, 1989).
35. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
36. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–87 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
37. But see Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atomic Bomb, and Other Essays (New York: Summit, 1988).
38. Bruce Catton, The Terrible Swift Sword (New York: Doubleday, 1963).
1. The story is told in Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (1956), 463–72.
2. See a series of articles by Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills: “Flawed Trials Lead to Death Chamber: Bush Confident in System Rife with Problems,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2000; “Gatekeeper Court Keeps Gates Shut; Justices Prove Reluctant to Nullify Cases,” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2000 (on Governor Bush); “Ryan Suspends Death Penalty; Illinois First State to Impose Moratorium on Executions,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 31, 2000 (on Governor Ryan); “Ryan: ‘Until I Can Be Sure’ Illinois Is First State to Suspend Death Penalty,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 1, 2000 (on Ryan).
3. See the Harris Report, July 11–17, 2000 (reporting 64 percent support today against a low of 38 percent in 1964 and a high in Harris polls of 75 percent in 1995).
4. See Gordon Hawkins and Franklin Zimring, The Death Penalty and the American Agenda (1986).
5. The antipedophile riots at the Portsdown housing complex in the summer of 2000 suggest the passions that can be unleashed when the public sees its children potentially at risk, but no sustained pressure for the reinstatement of capital punishment has resulted from such outbreaks.
6. And true to form, the British government at first proposed not to adopt the Sixth Protocol, because it wishes to be able to reinstate the death penalty—should there be reason to do so—without the need to denounce the entire convention.
7. Indeed, thus far the majority of retests have saved the life of the convicted criminal, but a minority of retests have confirmed their guilt; see Gregg Easterbrook, “The Myth of Fingerprints: DNA and the End of Innocence,” New Republic, July 31, 2000.
8. A thought implicit in the ECHR’s second article.
9. H.L.A. Hart, “Prolegomena to a Theory of Punishment,” in Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (1968).
10. This, of course, is explicitly denied by the Supreme Court’s judgment in Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280 (1976), in which it is argued that the Eighth Amendment requires that the amount of punishment must not be excessive, but not that it must be the minimum necessary. Just how much is to be inflicted is a matter for the legislature.
11. Immanuel Kanat, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, 1968.
12. Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).
13. Leviticus, chap. 20, contains an impressive catalogue of capital offenses.
1. On religion, see Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes on Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, edited by Tom Sorell, 346–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I have written on this elsewhere: see Ryan, “Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life,” in The Nature of Political Theory, edited by David Miller and Larry Siedentop, 197–218 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), reprinted as chapter 10 of the present volume; and “Hobbes and Individualism,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, edited by G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, 81–105 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), reprinted as chapter 9 of the present volume. Two much more extended and very useful recent accounts, differently oriented but not wholly at odds with each other, are S. A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s “Leviathan”: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). David Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), is an elegant argument for the view that Hobbes’s purpose in his discussion of religion is to remove religious controversy from politics. My general perspective on Hobbes is not unlike that of Michael Oakeshott in Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).
2. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 316; everyone comments on the fact that Hobbes’s physical timidity was quite at odds with his intellectual boldness. Leslie Stephen, Hobbes (London: Macmillan, 1904), is still a very engaging account of its subject.
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 76–77; citations to Leviathan are to this edition.
4. Thomas Hobbes, De Mirabilibus Pecci: Being the Wonders of the Peak in Darby-Shire (1636).
5. The Collected English Works of Thomas Hobbes [cited as EW], ed. William Molesworth (London, 1839–45), 8:viii.
6. Ibid., 8:xvi.
7. Ibid., 8:xvi–xvii, 221: “It was in name, a state democratical; but in fact a government of the principal man.” For two very different views of the place of Thucydides in Hobbes’s political thought, see Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), and John Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London: Hutchinson, 1965).
8. EW 8:vii.
9. Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, ed. Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
10. Hobbes, Leviathan, 149.
11. Ibid., 257.
12. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), for Hobbes’s controversy with Robert Boyle; for Hobbes’s (failed) relations with the Royal Society, see Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes and the Royal Society,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, 43–66 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
13. Hobbes, Leviathan, 38; for the problems of Hobbes’s account of science, see Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas. The best recent account of these is in Tom Sorell, Hobbes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), and on the bearing of Hobbes’s science on his politics, the same author’s “The Science in Hobbes’s Politics,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, 67–80 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
14. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 115–16.
15. This idea is particularly associated with Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1957); it sets the context for the discussion in Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas.
16. See Popper, Poverty of Historicism, for an account of situational logic; also see Martin Hollis, The Cunning of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
17. I have long been in Martin Hollis’s debt for this insight; see his “Theory in Miniature,” Mind 82 (1973): 525–41.
18. The most sustained discussion from this standpoint comes in David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), and Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
19. The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 161–63.
20. Ibid., 161.
21. Hobbes, Leviathan, 37.
22. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 36.
23. Ibid., 37.
24. Ibid., 36–37.
25. As he did in De Cive and The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, where he simply presumes the truth of the psychological basis of our problems in the state of nature.
26. Hobbes, Leviathan, 9; incidentally, Martinich’s view that Hobbes’s use of this analogy shows how seriously he took religion seems rather forced, especially since Martinich emphasizes the sharpness of the distinction that Hobbes drew between the behavior of human beings and the essentially unintelligible behavior of God.
27. Ibid., 89.
28. The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 6 (i.e., 1.2.9).
29. Hobbes, Leviathan, 119; the account in De Cive, 87–88, is equally insistent on the role of pride or “eminence” in creating discord.
30. Aristotle, Politics, 7 (1.2.10).
31. Hobbes, Leviathan, 107–8.
32. Ibid., 126, 128.
33. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses (London: Everyman, 1993); Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Pioneers of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961); François Tricaud, “Hobbes’s Conception of the State of Nature from 1640 to 1651,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, 107–23 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), explores ambiguities in Hobbes’s account, and especially variations between his accounts in Elements, De cive, and Leviathan, that I do not touch on here.
34. Hobbes, Leviathan, 89–90; De Cive, 32–33, 45.
35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 89; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), provides a riveting account of the role of American Indians in European accounts of “natural man.”
36. Hobbes, Leviathan, 75–76; incidentally, this passage, founding religion on “some peculiar quality, or at least in some eminent degree thereof, not to be found in other Living creatures,” shows how much closer Rousseau and Hobbes were than is commonly thought.
37. Hobbes, Leviathan, 70.
38. Ibid., 87.
39. Ibid., 170.
40. Cf. Hobbes’s comparison of life to a race (EW 4:53) in which there is no other goal but to come first.
41. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, 221.
42. Ibid., 91.
43. Ibid., 111; De cive, 76; the question whether Hobbes made their status as divine commands central to the analysis of the laws of nature has been much debated. Martinich’s claim in Two Gods is the most recent defense of the view that he does. My own view is that he may well have thought that God commanded obedience to them, but that he still thought that they could bring men to agreement by virtue of their status as “convenient articles of peace.”
44. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Second Treatise, sec. 4.
45. Hobbes, Leviathan, 90; De Cive, 42–43.
46. This is not to slight the interesting work of David Gauthier and Jean Hampton cited above; it is, however, to say that they discuss some issues that I do not think Hobbes’s account in fact raises. That it is too late in the day to deny the label “Hobbesian” to such problems is very likely true, just as it is, as Hampton agrees, too late to relabel Hobbes’s argument if it is, as she thinks, not a “contractual” argument in the strict sense at all; see Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 186–88, and David Gauthier, “Hobbes’s Social Contract,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan, 125–52 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Gauthier agrees that the state of nature is not a pure prisoner’s dilemma, but he remains (I think) firmly wedded to a utility-maximizing psychology. The title of Gregory Kavka’s Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986) is entirely apt, of course, because he focuses on issues of mutual deterrence that arise whether or not all parties are utility maximizers.
47. Hobbes, Leviathan, 93; De Cive, 63. One of the many insights made by Brian Barry is the special status of contractual agreement as an obligation-undertaking device (“Warrender and His Critics,” Philosophy 43 [1968]: 117–37).
48. Hobbes, Leviathan, 117.
49. This is famously spelled out in Anatol Rapaport, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), and discussed in passing in Gauthier, “Hobbes’s Social Contract.”
50. Hobbes, Leviathan, 120.
51. Ibid., 97–98; cf. 138–39.
52. Ibid., 138–39; it is to be noticed that Hobbes’s account has a curious internal flaw. I do not follow Don Herzog (in Happy Slaves) in his cheerful view that Hobbes’s contradictions were the small price Hobbes had to pay for the rhetorical effect he wanted to make, so I wish I could see some way out of them. We begin with a right to all things in the state of nature; thus we have a right to the obedience of others, but one that they have no obligation to recognize, because they cannot save their lives by recognizing it, and that, in any case, is at odds with their equal right to have the obedience of everyone else. Hobbes often suggests that the covenant is necessary only because a human sovereign needs the help of others to exercise his rights; God, whose kingdom is “gotten by violence,” needs none. Then the interesting question is whether the victor in battle has a right to my obedience. It looks as though he has, because I cannot resist, and the victor has that right—that is, to my obedience—in the state of nature. On the other hand, Hobbes insists that I am under an obligation only once I have submitted; that is, I have agreed to obey. This introduces an asymmetry between the right to command and the obligation to obey. The one view of obligation I think we may reject is John Plamenatz’s in Man and Society: A Critical Examination of Some Important Social and Political Theories from Machiavelli to Marx, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1963), according to which “I am obliged” means “I had better.” It is clear this does not make sense of obligations stemming from covenant.
53. Hobbes, Leviathan, 484; Hampton, in arguing for a noncontractual interpretation of Hobbes, insists that all agreements must be upon terms, and therefore cannot confer absolute power (Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition); Locke, in Second Treatise, sec. 8, argues against the suggestion that we might contract into servitude on that basis.
54. Hobbes, Leviathan, 18, 121–29.
55. Ibid., 101; cf. note 52 above.
56. Ibid., 141; cf. note 53 above.
57. Ibid., 142.
58. Ibid., 231.
59. Ibid., 216.
60. Ibid., 127.
61. Ibid., 231.
62. Thomas Hobbes, An Historical Discourse and Narration Concerning Heresy (1680); Richard Tuck points out that Hobbes and Locke were, in fact, of one mind on toleration in the 1670s. Locke later hardened his position on toleration, not in the sense of becoming more or less tolerant, but in the sense of refusing to accept toleration as a concession from the monarch (“Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary Dietz, 153–71 [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990]).
63. Hobbes, Leviathan, 479.
64. Ibid., 239; the portrait of Hobbes as the great proto-theorist of market society by C. B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) is wonderfully imaginative but entirely implausible.
65. Hobbes, Leviathan, 149.
66. Ibid., 91; cf. 145.
67. Marginal note to Leviathan, 152.
68. Hobbes, Leviathan, 226; Hobbes was certain that the only role of Parliament was to give advice to the sovereign, and many times said that it was no accident that people called their king a sovereign but did not so call Parliament—not entirely fairly to the usage of “king-in-Parliament.” Deborah Baumgold argues a delicate case for the implicit constitutionalism of Hobbes’s theory (Hobbes’s Political Theory [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]).
69. Hobbes, Leviathan, 232.
70. Ibid., 214.
71. One interesting place where Hobbes’s argument was indeed simply reinvented three hundred years later was the 1950s attempt to deal with the issue of unjust “punishment” by the definitional maneuver of pointing out that only a penalty inflicted on the guilty for a crime could count as “punishment.” Here, Hobbes’s chapter 28 surely is three hundred years ahead of its time, whatever one thinks of the quality of the argument itself.
72. Hobbes, Leviathan, “Review and Conclusion,” 484–85.
1. Alan Ryan, “The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau,” in The Limits of Human Nature, ed. Jonathan Benthall, 3–19 (London, 1973), reprinted as chapter 11 in the present volume; Ryan, “Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life,” in The Nature of Political Theory, ed. David Miller and L. A. Siedentop, 197–218 (Oxford, 1981), reprinted as chapter 10 in the present volume. This present essay is a companion to Ryan, “A More Tolerant Hobbes?” in Essays on Toleration, ed. Susan Mendus, 37–59 (Cambridge, 1988).
2. C. B. Macpherson, “Hobbes’s Bourgeois Man,” in Hobbes Studies, ed. Keith Brown, 169–83 (Oxford, 1965); Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962); Macpherson, introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth, 1968).
3. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford, 1936); Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Vision in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1960).
4. Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford, 1975).
5. On which see Maurice Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (New York, 1968) and J.W.N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas, 2nd ed. (London, 1973), both of them at odds with Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes.
6. Alexander Ross, Leviathan Drawn Out with a Hook (London, 1653), A5.
7. John Aubrey, Brief Lives (Harmondsworth, 1962), 314.
8. Edward Hyde, A Brief Review of Mr Hobbes’s Leviathan (London, 1670), “Epistle Dedicatory.”
9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1968), 171.
10. Ross complains of this (Leviathan Drawn Out, 24–25).
11. Hobbes, Leviathan, 112.
12. John Eachard, Mr Hobbes’s State of Nature Examined (London, 1672), preface.
13. John Shafto, The Great Law of Nature (London, 1672), A3–4.
14. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas, 17ff.
15. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, 1945), 1:124–27.
16. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1975), 417–20.
17. Roger Woolhouse, Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Knowledge (Oxford, 1971), 10ff.
18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 118.
19. Ibid., 115.
20. Ross, Leviathan Drawn Out, 12–13; Hobbes, Leviathan, 82.
21. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 309.
22. Hobbes, Leviathan, 142; cf. 134–36.
23. Ibid., 111–12.
24. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford, 1972), 153–61.
25. Popper, Objective Knowledge; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” in The Social Contract and Discourses (London, 1973).
26. Ernest Gellner, The Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge, 1974), 27 ff.
27. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Oxford, 1983), 50.
28. Brian Barry, “Warrender and His Critics,” in Hobbes and Rousseau, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard Peters, 37–65 (London, 1972); John Plamenatz, “Mr. Warrender’s Hobbes,” in Brown, Hobbes Studies, 76–78; Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford, 1964), 287ff.
29. Hobbes, Leviathan, 256.
30. Clarendon, Short Review, “Epistle Dedicatory.”
31. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 189
32. Hobbes, Leviathan, 189, 217.
33. Barry, “Warrender and His Critics,” 36ff.
34. David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford, 1969), 76ff.
35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 161.
36. Hobbes, De Cive, 168.
37. Hobbes, Leviathan, 217.
38. Ibid., 396.
39. Hobbes, De Cive, 199.
40. Ibid., 179.
41. Ibid., 186.
42. Hobbes, Leviathan, 398.
43. Ibid., 397.
44. Ross, Leviathan Drawn Out, 2.
45. Hobbes, Leviathan, 75–76; Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 115ff.
46. Hobbes, Leviathan, 376.
47. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1964).
48. Hobbes, Leviathan, 718–19.
49. Clarendon Short Review.
50. Hobbes, introduction to Leviathan, 11ff.
51. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 120ff.
52. Shafto, Great Law of Nature, A2.
53. Thomas Tenison, The Creed of Mr Hobbs Examined (London, 1670).
54. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
55. Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association.
1. See particularly, John Plamenatz, Man and Society: A Critical Examination of Some Important Social and Political Theories from Machiavelli to Marx (London: Longmans, 1963), 1: chap. 4; his introduction to Hobbes, Leviathan (London, Collins, 1962), 3–55; and Plamenatz, “Mr Warrender’s Hobbes,” Political Studies 5 (1957): 295–308.
2. John Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), chaps. 4 and 6.
3. Plamenatz, Man and Society, 1:207.
4. Plamenatz, introduction to Leviathan, 55.
5. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), 280.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Dent, 1914), 93.
7. Ibid., 88–89.
8. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes [cited as EW], ed. William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1841), 2:2.
9. Hobbes, EW 2:292–97.
10. M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 214–20.
11. Hobbes, “Behemoth,” EW 6:167–69.
12. Leslie Stephen, Hobbes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 31, 34; his hostility is unabated in “Behemoth,” EW 6:169–75.
13. Hobbes, EW 2:315.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 316; but cf. Leviathan, 328.
16. Hobbes, Leviathan, 219.
17. Hobbes, EW 4:388; cf. EW 6:174.
18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 391.
19. Hobbes, EW 2:203.
20. Hobbes, EW 4:215; cf. EW 2:178–80; Stephen, Hobbes, 31.
21. D. D. Raphael, Hobbes (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), 33.
22. Hobbes, Leviathan, 24.
23. Ibid., 34.
24. J. S. Mill, Three Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 22–23; Hobbes, Leviathan, 283–84.
25. Hobbes, Leviathan, 53.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 194.
28. Ibid., 56.
29. Ibid., 83.
30. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 180–81.
31. Hobbes, EW 6:45.
32. Hobbes, Leviathan, 24.
33. J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in Collected Works (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1969), 10:229–32.
34. Hobbes, EW 2:1–3.
35. Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); cf. Shirley Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), chap. 21.
36. This is not wholly surprising: he thought Brave New World had been lifted from his own book The Scientific Outlook. R. W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 566.
37. Hobbes, Leviathan, 89.
38. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 281.
39. Keith Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” in Hobbes Studies, ed. Keith Brown, 185–236 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965).
40. Hobbes, Leviathan, 131; cf. EW 2:157 and 178, where sumptuary laws are recommended.
41. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 121.
42. Hobbes, EW 4:53.
43. Stephen, Hobbes, 23–24; Thomas, “Social Origins,” 220–21.
44. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (London: Allen and Unwin, 1916), chap. 1; Mill, Three Essays, 73.
1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. H. J. Patton (London: Hutchinson, 1952); R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).
2. This phrase from his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality may have been intended to avoid too obvious a conflict with the creation story of Genesis.
3. Quentin Skinner, “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Historical Journal 9 (1966): 286–317.
4. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
5. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
6. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
7. See D. E. Broadbent, Behaviour (London: Methuen, 1968).
8. Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language 35 (1959): 26–58.
9. See, for example, his account of the prisoner’s dilemma in Rapaport, Fights, Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
10. John Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London: Hutchinson, 1965).
11. Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Pessimism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
12. Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
13. Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970).
14. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
15. See the long chapter on Julie in Berman, Politics of Authenticity.
1. Knud Haakonssen, ed., Traditions of Liberalism: Essays on John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill (Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, 1988). The present essay first appeared in this collection.
2. Quotations from Locke’s Treatises are identified in the text by 1 (First Treatise) and 2 (Second Treatise) and the section number.
3. I say this in spite of Hobbes’s insistence that a law of nature is a truth found out by reason whereby we are forbidden to do what is destructive of our own welfare; Hobbes’s summary of natural law in the negative Golden Rule—“Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you”—precisely is to reduce natural law to rules of mutual forbearance.
4. Shirley Robin Letwin, “John Locke: Liberalism and Natural Law,” in Traditions of Liberalism, ed. Knud Haakonssen, 3–29 (Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, 1988); see 7ff., 13ff.
5. I had not read Shirley Robin Letwin’s essay when writing my own. She and I are wholly in agreement that Locke’s conception of individual rights does not rest on any kind of moral pluralism. The only pluralism in Locke is supplied by the thought that God has given us diverse talents and placed us in diverse situations, so that the practical implications of the injunction to employ God’s bounty to the best of our abilities are different for different people. But she and I are at odds on the political implications of this. Locke’s sense of the sanctity of the individual’s private concerns seems to me to be quite as firm a basis for the rule of law as one could ask.
1. J. S. Mill, On Liberty, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (London: Penguin, 1974). All citations to Liberty are to this edition.
1. See Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London: Macmillan, 1970) and my introduction to vol. 9 of John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (hereafter cited as CW), 33 vols., edited by J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91); see also John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989).
2. Not that this stopped us trying; see Alan Ryan, “The Family Mill,” review of James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century, by Bruce Mazlish, New York Review of Books, 29 May 1975, 4–8, and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s deftly but even more comprehensively destructive review, “Clio and Oedipus,” Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 1975, 565–66.
3. As Himmelfarb’s On Liberty and Liberalism (New York: Knopf, 1974) seems to suppose it does.
4. There can, of course, be fruitful and sympathetic ways of linking Mill’s feminism to his larger liberalism; Nadia Urbinati, “John Stuart Mill on Androgyny and the Ideal Marriage,” Political Theory 19 (1991): 626–48, gives a very persuasive instance.
5. See, for instance, some notably intransigent assaults and rebuttals in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
6. J. S. Mill, CW 1:5.
7. Ibid.
8. See Robert Cumming, “Mill’s History of His Opinions,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1965): 235–56.
9. J. S. Mill, CW 1:5.
10. All of these are perfectly fascinating subjects, of course. They are treated with unusual judiciousness and good sense in Gail Tulloch, Mill and Sexual Equality (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1989).
11. J. S. Mill, CW 12:28–30.
12. On Mill and Eyre, see Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), 467–72; on Marx’s essay “The Civil War in France,” see J. S. Mill, CW, 17:1754n3.
13. Or who had fought his father to an honorable draw, as in Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.
14. J. S. Mill, On Liberty, CW 18:258–59, 262–63.
15. Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London: Macmillan, 1970); John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); Fred Berger, Happiness, Justice and Freedom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
16. See particularly the works by Gray and Berger cited in note 15.
17. J. S. Mill, CW 21:337.
18. Ibid., 1:145.
19. Ibid., 13:655–57.
20. Ibid., 10:329–30.
21. Ibid., 13:697–98.
22. Ibid., 1:609.
23. Ibid., 14:155, 181–82.
24. See Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Interpretation,” in Tully, Meaning and Context, 29–67.
25. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962).
26. J. S. Mill, CW 18:261.
27. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
28. J. S. Mill, CW 18:255.
29. Ibid., 8:840–41.
30. Ibid., 1:211.
31. Howard Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 118–21.
32. See Susan Mendus, “To Have and to Hold: Liberalism and the Marriage Contract,” and Mary Stokes, “A Comment on Mendus,” both in Liberalism and Recent Legal and Social Philosophy, ed. Richard Bellamy, 70–85 (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1989).
1. See the interesting collection of the first reviews of On Liberty assembled by Pyle (1994).
2. As Hamburger (1991) is the latest of a long line of critics to argue.
3. My discussion of utilitarianism (Ryan [1970], 227–29), made a similar though not identical point.
4. On Mill’s career in the service of the East India Company, see the works by Zastoupil (1994) and Moir (1990).
5. For instance, I pay no attention to the difficulty of giving an account of the concept of harm, since I can add nothing to the discussion by Feinberg (1984), and I am content to endorse Waldron’s (1987) insistence that Mill would have counted the mental discomfort caused when our prejudices are shaken not as harmful but as good for us.
6. For those in search of something sharper, Himmelfarb (1974) offers a notably unkind account of the conception, purposes, content, and effects of the book.
7. J. M. Robson’s “Textual Introduction” to volume 10 of Mill’s Collected Works gives a complete account of the writing of Auguste Comte and Positivism; Mill was deterred from tackling Comte in 1854 by his own antipathy to Harriet Martineau, whose recent translations and commentaries would have been the ostensible occasion for his compte rendu, and even more by Harriet Taylor’s antipathy to Mrs. Martineau. See CW 10:cxxix–cxxxii.
8. “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity,” Wilhelm von Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government; epigraph to J. S. Mill, On Liberty, CW 18:215.
9. “It is proper to state that I forgo any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorize the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people” (CW 18:224).
10. See, for instance, the analysis by Gray (1983).
11. See Gray (1983) for a book-length elaboration of that claim, and Utilitarianism (CW 10:250–51), for Mill’s explanation of rights.
12. He acquired it as a result of the savagery of his reviews in the Saturday Review; it was bestowed on him by his friends, who admired his prose but winced for his victims’ sensibilities.
13. Popper’s 1974 work is, perhaps surprisingly, not the classic source of the doctrine that science progresses by the process of making hypotheses and testing them against the evidence; his 1959 study, first published in German in 1934, is that.
14. For the distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberty, see Berlin (1969).
15. See, for example, the work by Musgrave et al. (1970).
16. See also his letters to Theodore Gomperz and Arnold Ruge in which he suggests that the essay is less needed in Germany “than here” (CW 10:539, 598).
17. See Rawls (1971, 205–11) for a discussion of liberty of conscience.
18. See Rawls (1933a, 48–62); there is already a substantial critical literature.
19. Raz (1983) hints at such possibilities; the argument of Wollheim (1979, 253–69) provides yet another route.
20. This is partly a prudential argument against such measures, not an argument from high principle; and the moral principle in question is simple utilitarianism—the misery caused is not justified by the good achieved.
21. See Ryan (1995, chap. 3); and for a much longer and more detailed account, Rockefeller (1991, 76–124).
22. Cf. the study by Taylor (1989).
23. See, for instance, Berlin (1969), “Two Concepts of Liberty.”
24. Ryan 1970, chaps. 12–13.
1. Quentin Skinner, “The Limits of Historical Explanations,” Philosophy 41 (1966): 199–215, and “The History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–53.
2. Jenifer Hart, “Nineteenth Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History,” Past & Present 31 (1965): 45.
3. R. K. Webb, “Benthamites and Unitarians” (mimeo), 3. I am grateful to Professor Webb for permission to cite his paper here.
4. Cf. P. G. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1958), chap. 2, and W. Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford, 1957), chap. 5.
5. A. Schutz, “The Phenomenology of the Social World,” in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. M. Natanson, 183ff. (New York, 1963).
6. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), and cf. S. S. Wolin, “Political Theory and Paradigms,” in Politics and Experience, ed. P. King and B. C. Parekh, 125–52 (Cambridge, 1968).
7. O.O.G.M. MacDonagh, “The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal,” Historical Journal 1 (1958): 52–67.
8. A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (London, 1905).
9. Hart, “Nineteenth Century Social Reform,” 41.
10. MacDonagh, “Revolution in Government,” 65–66.
11. Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, chaps. 4 and 5.
12. Webb, “Benthamites and Unitarians,” 6–8.
13. Mill-Taylor Collection (manuscripts and letters), British Library of Political and Economic Science, file 1, nos. 27 and 28.
14. J. S. Mill, Autobiography (New York, 1956), 113 ff.
15. J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, 8th ed. (London, 1906), 3.
16. E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), chap. 1.
17. Parliamentary Papers 1854–55, vol. 20, Report and Papers relating to the Reorganisation of the Civil Service: Papers, 87–98 (Mill and Vaughan), and Report, 24–31 (Jowett).
18. E. Hughes, “Sir Charles Trevelyan and Civil Service Reform, 1853–5,” pt. 1, English Historical Review 64 (1949): 62.
19. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, 13–16, and chaps. 1–3 generally.
20. To House of Lords Select Committee, June 1852 (Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, 30:300–32).
21. Ibid., 30:301.
22. Plus ça change: The essays in the present volume originally appeared in scattered books and journals; they were put into an electronic form suitable for editing by a retyping service in India.
23. S. R. Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainty (Cambridge, 1965), chap. 12.
24. James Mill, History of British India (London, 1856), 6:13.
25. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, 64.
26. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Everyman Edition, n.d.), 73–74.
27. J. S. Mill, System of Logic, 3.
28. J. S. Mill, On Liberty, 73.
29. M. Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London, 1968), 241ff., 262–63.
30. James Mill, Essay on Government (Cambridge, 1937), 3–4.
31. Parliamentary Papers 1857–58, vol. 43, Memorandum . . . of the Improvements in the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years.
32. James Mill, Essay on Government, 6–7, 13.
33. Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, 30:303.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 331.
37. Ibid., 321.
38. Ibid., 322.
39. Ibid., 325.
40. Ibid., 305.
41. H. Parris, “The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal Reappraised,” Historical Journal 3 (1960): 19ff.
42. G. Himmelfarb, “The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham,” in Victorian Minds, 32–81 (London, 1968).
43. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, 52–58.
44. Ibid., 47–48.
45. Parliamentary Papers 1857–58, vol. 43, Memorandum, 17.
46. Ibid., 35.
47. Examiner, May 1873.
48. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, 49–50.
49. Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, 30:316 (Mill’s evidence).
50. Examiner, May 1873.
51. The pamphlets were all published by William Penny, London, during 1858; they are anonymous, but Mill’s own bibliography of his published writings lists them as his work. I should like to express my gratitude to Mr. Martin Moir of the India Office Records for his help in finding these pamphlets and various other East India Company tracts. The pamphlets are A Constitutional View of the India Question, Practical Observations on the First Two of the Proposed Resolutions on the Government of India, A President in Council the Best Government for India, and The Moral of the India Debate.
52. Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. 148, appendix, Petition of the East India Company (presented to Earl Grey in the Lords, Feb. 11, 1858), col. 1.
53. Parliamentary Papers 1852–53, 30:313.
54. Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. 148, Petition, col. 2.
55. Ibid., col. 3.
56. [J. S. Mill], The Moral of the India Debate, 3.
57. J. S. Mill, Representative Government (Everyman Edition, n.d.), 333–34.
58. Parliamentary Papers 1857–58, 43:43.
59. Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. 148, Petition.
60. J. S. Mill, Representative Government, 334–35.
61. Ibid., 232.
62. Parliamentary Papers 1854–55, vol. 20, Papers; the evidence of Stephen, Cornewall Lewis, and Booth, among others.
63. Ibid., 95.
64. M. St. J. Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954), 349–57.
65. Ibid., 368.
66. Parliamentary Papers 1854–55, vol. 20, Papers, 92.
67. Ibid., 76.
68. Quoted in Hughes, “Trevelyan and Civil Service Reform,” 56.
69. Parliamentary Papers 1854–55, vol. 20, Papers, 95.
70. Ibid., 96n.
71. Ibid., 94.
72. Ibid., 92.
73. Ibid., 98.
74. Ibid., 92.
75. Parliamentary Papers 1854–55, vol. 20, Report, 3.
76. Mill, On Liberty, 68–70, cf. Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London, 1970), chap. 13.
77. Mill, On Liberty, 140.
78. See, e.g., ibid., 159–63, so far as education is concerned.
79. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, 64.
80. See, e.g., the quotation from Humboldt that stands at the beginning of On Liberty; the well-known essay “Coleridge” does more than justice to the latter’s influence.
81. A. Briggs, Victorian People (London, 1954), 117–18.
82. Ibid., 68–72.
83. J. S. Mill, Representative Government, 260–67.
84. Ibid., 235–9.
85. Ibid., 237.
86. Parliamentary Papers 1854–55, vol. 20, Report, 3.
87. J. S. Mill, Representative Government, 333–35.
88. Ibid., 335.
89. Ibid., 244–46.
90. Ibid., 248–49.
91. G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London, 1906), 279.
92. I should like to record my thanks for the help and comments I received from Gillian Sutherland and Jenifer Hart.
1. G. C. Duncan and S. M. Lukes, “The New Democracy,” Political Studies 11 (1963); 156–77; Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, 1970), 1–35.
2. L. Davis, “The Cost of Realism: Contemporary Restatements of Democracy,” Western Political Quarterly 17 (1964): 37–46.
3. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London, 1943), 269.
4. Ibid., 282–83, 295.
5. S. M. Lipset, Political Man (London, 1960), chaps. 4 and 5.
6. Davis, “Cost of Realism,” 39.
7. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, chap. 2.
8. Ibid., 109; Robert Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 143–66.
9. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 22ff.
10. J.-J. Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London, 1973; rev. ed.), 218 (bk. 3, chap. 4).
11. Ibid., 217.
12. Ibid., 219 (bk. 3, chap. 5).
13. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (London, 1964), 229–30.
14. Dahl, After the Revolution? 140ff.
15. Rousseau, Social Contract, 240 (bk. 3, chap. 15).
16. Ibid.
17. R. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire, 133–34 (Cambridge, 1978).
18. R. P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York, 1970), 27.
19. Rousseau, Social Contract, 169 (bk. 1, chap. 4).
20. R. M. Hare, “The Lawful Government,” in Philosophy, Politics, and Society, ser. 3, ed. P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1967), 157–72.
21. It is also open to us to dilute the notion of consent as Locke does, and count as tacit consenters all those who derive benefits from the government; then, the nonconsenting will become a different group, posing different problems; see J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1967; 2nd ed.), 365–67 (2nd treatise, secs. 119–22).
22. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1962), 97 (chap. 19).
23. Ibid.
24. Rousseau, Social Contract, 245 (bk. 4, chap. 18).
25. Ibid., 249–51 (bk. 5, chap. 2).
26. Wolff, Anarchism, 70.
27. Rousseau, Social Contract, 240 (bk. 4, chap. 15).
28. Ibid., 193 (bk. 2, chap. 6).
29. J. Lively, Democracy (Oxford, 1975), 17.
30. Rousseau, Social Contract, 250 (bk. 4, chap. 2).
31. Ibid.
32. R. M. Hare, “Political Obligation,” in Social Ends and Political Means, ed. T. Honderich (London, 1976), 1–12.
33. James Mill, An Essay on Government (Indianapolis, 1955), 66–67.
34. Ibid., 60.
35. Ibid., 75–77.
36. Alan Ryan, “Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy,” in The Growth of Nineteenth Century Government, ed. G. Sutherland, 33–62 (London, 1972), reprinted as chapter 16 of the present volume.
37. James Mill, Essay on Government, 73–74.
38. Rousseau, Social Contract, 242–43 (bk. 3, chap. 16).
39. Ibid., 244 (bk. 3, chap. 17).
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 227–30 (bk. 3, chap. 8).
43. Ibid., 253ff. (bk. 4, chap. 4).
44. Ibid., 183–84 (bk. 2, chap. 3).
45. Ibid., 245 (bk. 3, chap. 18).
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 247 (bk. 4, chap. 1).
48. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952).
49. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 202.
50. Ibid., 205–6.
51. Ibid., 73.
52. Ryan, “Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy,” 45.
53. This, of course, does not entail that each man has only one vote; Mill defends plural votes as well as the equality of the sexes (Utilitarianism, 290–91).
54. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Toronto, 1965), 793.
55. Ibid., 763–64.
56. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 247.
57. Ibid., 216–17.
58. Rousseau, Social Contract, 192–93 (bk. 2, chap. 6)
59. Ibid., 182 (bk. 2, chap. 1).
60. Kant’s Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, 79 (Cambridge, 1970).
61. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972).
62. J.-J. Rousseau, The Government of Poland (Indianapolis, 1972), 5ff.
63. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 74, 132.
64. Ibid., 68–69.
65. C. L. Ten, Mill on Liberty (Oxford, 1980).
1. See, for instance, Jennifer Pitts (2005), chap. 5.
2. See, for example, Mill’s letter to the Morning Chronicle, July 5, 1853 (CW 25:1193–94).
3. Mill to the Penny Newsman, Mar. 15, 1863 (CW 25:1201–4).
1. François Furet, Penser la révolution française (Paris, 1974).
2. André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 37.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. But see Joel Schwartz, “The Penitentiary and Perfectibility in Tocqueville,” Western Political Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1985): 7–26.
5. G. W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938).
6. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New York: Doubleday, 1952).
7. L. A. Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan, 153–74 (Oxford, 1979).
8. See Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies (New York, 1989).
9. J. L. Mesick, The English Travellers in America, 1785–1835 (New Haven, 1922).
10. This is discussed at length by Phillips Bradley in his introduction to the 1945 Knopf edition of Democracy in America (1:viii–c in the 1991 printing).
11. Citations are to the Everyman’s Library edition of the work: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1994).
1. This is an abbreviated treatment of issues I tackle at much greater length in John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995); toward the end, in particular, it gets pretty hasty, therefore. For “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” see Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1:197–202. I ought to say, what I hope is obvious enough, that Rorty and I are not at odds, but rather at nuances. I think there is more a “philosophical metanarrative” in Dewey than Rorty does, though it surely does not invoke “noumena”; and I demur at the thought that the institutions that liberalism requires are informatively described as “bourgeois,” especially in light of Dewey’s own attachment to something like guild socialism. But these are complaints from under the same umbrella.
2. Thus, in Dewey’s Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), “modern” means after the Reformation and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, while in Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Putnam, 1935), “modern” means the twentieth century as opposed to the nineteenth century. There is no particular confusion here: liberalism of all kinds is a modern phenomenon, but “new liberalism” was a response within that liberal tradition to new problems as they emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
3. Dewey to Scudder Klyce, Apr. 16, 1915, quoted in Steven Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 328.
4. In this, as much else, he admitted a debt to G.D.H. Cole’s work and espoused a view very like that offered by Russell in Roads to Freedom and Principles of Social Reconstruction.
5. John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” in The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, ed. J. A. Boydston et al., 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–72), 1:227–49.
6. John Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, ed. J. A. Boydston et al., 17 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–87), 11:46ff.
7. Rorty says just what I am tempted to say, namely, that Dewey and others such as Michael Oakeshott “take over Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s conception of moral agency while either naturalizing or junking the rest of Hegel” (“Post-Modernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Philosophical Papers 1:197–98). But the interesting issue that this buries is what of the rest is “naturalized” and what “junked.”
8. See John Dewey, “The Psychological Standpoint” and “Psychology as Philosophic Method,” in Early Works 1:122–43, 144–67 (the essays were first published in Mind, January and April 1886).
9. It is true, too, that Dewey could have turned the charge of residual Absolutism against Russell if he had thought to; Russell always hankered after what Bernard Williams has called “the absolute conception of the world,” and it seems that Dewey really did not. On this, Hilary Putnam is illuminating (Renewing Philosophy [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992], chap. 5).
10. The book that makes this case most straightforwardly is Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), but it is also the burden of Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Habermas’s interest in Dewey goes back to Toward a Rational Society, but a perhaps even more interesting link (though not, I think, one explored by Habermas) is their common obsession with communication.
11. This “must” is, of course, mere bullying in the absence of the argument, which this remark threatens but does not offer; there is certainly a sense in which Heidegger, say, was attuned to the modern world. I am tempted to say that the disastrousness of Heidegger’s career is as good an argument as any for that “must,” but here, at any rate, cannot do more than refer the skeptical to Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity for the kind of case that we need to make.
12. The story is told in George Dykhuizen, Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 22–24; the essay is reprinted in Early Works 1:3–8.
13. John Dewey, “Christianity and Democracy,” Early Works 4:9.
14. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, ed. J. A. Boydston et al., 15 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977–83), 14:227.
15. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Early Works 5:96–107.
16. John Dewey, The School and Society, Middle Works 1:3–109. It was an accidental best seller; the University of Chicago decided in 1899 to lay on a series of lectures and publications to publicize the university’s work, and Dewey’s lectures were part of that program. It was also an occasion to reflect on his Laboratory School’s work since it had opened in 1896—the topic of the lectures as delivered, in fact. It very rapidly made its way as a statement of “progressive” views about elementary education, and was a commercial as well as an intellectual hit. There is some unhappy correspondence between Dewey and the publisher at the University of Chicago Press in the Dewey Papers; Dewey was not bashful about money, but the press plainly felt that he had been less than open about his plan to have the second printing done by Macmillan. It may also have been a decision provoked by his growing irritation with the university and its administration.
17. See, for instance, Avital Simhony, “The Social and Political Ideas of the English Idealists” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1980).
18. John Dewey, “The University Elementary School: General Outline of Study,” Middle Works 1:337.
19. A subject on which I shall not touch is Dewey and the city; critics have been more or less equally divided between complaining that he focuses exclusively on the city and thus neglects much else that he ought to attend to, and complaining that he hankers after an essentially rural way of life and thus spends his time trying to turn the school into an agency of rural patterns of socialization in spite of its urban setting. See Robert Westbrook, Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 150–94, for a great deal on all this. I think it is a noncontroversy; Dewey got interested in education in the Chicago of Jane Addams, which was much more like the environment that inspired the British (and, of course, the American) settlement movement than it was like anything we have encountered in the late twentieth century.
20. John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” Later Works 5:156.
21. It is not an accident that this kind of claim should sound so much like G. H. Mead; it was Mead and James Hayden Tufts who got Dewey to come to Chicago, and with the latter, Dewey wrote the most successful text in ethics ever to be put before American students, while the former’s work on the “I” and the “Me” so impressed Dewey that he later said he had stopped trying to do any original work in psychology and had simply taken over Mead’s results. It is to the Meads, incidentally, that the relatively felicitous prose of “The School and Society” was due; they reconstituted a publishable text from Dewey’s lecture notes.
22. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana/Collins, 1985).
23. John Dewey, “Art as Experience,” Later Works 10; see, e.g., 143–44.
24. I say this slightly hesitantly, partly because it leaves out the role of ideals, which certainly mattered a lot to Dewey, and partly because it underplays the role of the individual’s responsibility and answerability to others. If one were to ask what differentiates ethics from other sorts of decision-guiding thinking in Dewey, I think one would have to say that it is the role of “answering to others” for our decisions, and this may sit awkwardly with an emphasis on individual healthy functioning. Of course, in the ideal it does not, because in the ideal we find our own satisfaction in seeing our ideals realized in the community’s achievements; but even though Dewey was happy to take up the offer of a “moral holiday” that this rather Hegelian thought allows us, he was much too down to earth to ignore the importance of conflicts of interest. The difficulty is that once they are placed in the foreground, the “healthy individual in the healthy community” ideal can easily look like a fudge or wishful thinking.
25. See Westbrook, Dewey and American Democracy, 179–83.
26. John Dewey, “What Are We Fighting For?” Middle Works 11:105.
27. John Dewey, “In Explanation of Our Lapse,” Middle Works 10:292ff.
28. John Dewey, “The Future of Pacifism,” Middle Works 10:266–68.
1. The title of Cornel West’s quick tour of the pragmatist tradition is nicely chosen: not only the title but the content, too, of The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) leaves it squarely up to the reader to decide whether Americans—Dewey foremost among them—have simply ducked the hard issues of philosophy or have cleverly escaped the snares traditional philosophy sets for the unwary.
2. John Dewey, “The School and Society,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924 [cited as MW], ed. Jo Ann Boydston et al., 15 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977–83), 1:81. In this essay, I cite also The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898 [EW], ed. Jo Ann Boydston et al., 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–72).
3. John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” EW 5:84–95. I am not the first commentator to have had that sensation: “One is tempted to continue indefinitely quoting from this Creed,” wrote William H. Kilpatrick (“Dewey’s Influence on Education,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, 2nd ed. [New York: Open Court, 1971], 463).
4. Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” EW 5:95.
5. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (1961; New York: Vintage, 1964), 100.
6. Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” EW 5:86.
7. Ibid.
8. John Dewey, The School and Society, MW 1:8.
9. Ibid., 1:9.
10. Ibid.
11. The latter was Christopher Lasch’s criticism in The New Radicalism in America (New York: Knopf, 1965).
12. Dewey, The School and Society, MW 1:10.
13. Ibid., 1:39.
14. Ibid., 1:41–43.
15. Ibid., 1:81.
16. Ibid.
17. In fact, the Prussian government banned the establishment of kindergartens in 1851; this seems to have been the result not of an authoritarian government’s suspicion of all forms of freedom, but of the Ministry of Education confusing the apolitical, mystical Friedrich Froebel with his nephew, Karl, a socialist (Harry G. Good and James D. Teller, A History of Western Education [New York: Macmillan, 1969], 287).
18. Bertrand Russell’s two short books on education, On Education, and Education and the Social Order, do not go off on long metaphysical excursions, but there is something to be said for the thought that Russell’s attachment to Froebel and Montessori teaching methods was part of a desire to protect children from society rather than a desire to integrate them into society.
19. See, e.g., John Dewey, “The Interpretation of the Savage Mind,” MW 2:39–52.
20. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 141.
21. John Dewey, “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will,” EW 5:111–50.
22. John Dewey, How We Think, MW 6:208.
23. Ibid., 6:215.
24. Ibid., 6:338.
25. Ibid., 6:339.
26. Ibid., 6:237.
27. I do not mean that this can never be done in the public school system. Debbie Mayers’s success with the East Harlem school shows what can be done with an unusually talented principal and unusually devoted teachers; but nobody supposes that there is something here that can be set down as a recipe, whereas it is not too hard to see how a small school with a generous staff-student ratio would allow a Deweyan approach to flourish.
1. I should like to say how much I owe to the late G. A. Paul in this essay; it amounts to a good deal as to doctrine, and all but everything as to method.
2. See J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge, 1967), sec. 124, cf. sec. 134; all references, by section number, are to this to edition.
3. C. E. Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy Before and After Rousseau, 2 vols. (1925; New York, 1960).
4. W. Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule (Urbana, Ill., 1965).
5. J. W. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy: Eight Studies (Oxford, 1950).
6. R. H. Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford, 1960).
7. C. B. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, chap. 5; cf. “Locke on Capitalist Appropriation,” Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951): 550–66, and “The Social Bearing of Locke’s Political Theory,” Western Political Quarterly 7 (1954): 1–22.
8. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 221.
9. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 198, 230–31, 247–50.
10. Ibid., 221, 227.
11. Ibid., 256.
12. Ibid., 251.
13. Ibid., 236–37.
14. See J. P. Day, review of Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, by C. B. Macpherson, Philosophical Quarterly (1964): 266–68.
1. Charles Reich, “The New Property,” in Property, ed. C. B. Macpherson, 179–98 (Oxford, 1979).
2. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1942). All quotations from The Philosophy of Right [PhR] are from this edition.
3. M. Djilas, The New Class (New York, 1957).
4. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York, 1973), 248–50.
5. A. Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London, 1973), chap. 13.
6. Ibid.; R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class-Conflict in Industrial Society (London, 1959).
7. J. Locke, Two Treatises on Government (Cambridge, 1960), bk. 2, chap. 5.
8. J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London, 1973), 83.
9. H. Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge, 1970), 41–53.
10. James Mill, Essay on Government (Indianapolis, 1955), 52–54.
11. Ibid., 89–91.
12. D. Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” in Essays, 499–515 (Oxford, 1963).
13. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1975), 456ff.
14. L. Easton and K. Guddat, Writings of the Young Marx (New York, 1967), 320.
15. A. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. Allan Bloom (New York, 1969).
16. R. Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. B. Williams and S. Hampshire (Cambridge, 1979).
17. Locke, Two Treatises, 305–6.
18. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford, 1975), 174–82.
19. Locke, Two Treatises, 311 and note.
20. A. Honoré, “Ownership,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, ed. A. G. Guest, 107–47 (Oxford, 1961).
21. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1953), 136–37.
22. K. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (Cambridge, 1970), 106.
1. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 228.
2. A. M. Honore, “Ownership,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, ed. A. G. Guest, 107ff. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
3. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 54, 57.
4. J. S. Mill, The Principles of Political Economy, vols. 2 and 3 in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 2:201ff.
5. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Dent, 1914), 113.
6. N. Machiavelli, The Discourses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 42–43.
7. J. Bentham, Theory of Legislation (London: Trubner French, 1887), 93–198.
8. J.-J. Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses (London: Dent, 1973), 117–53.
9. Hobbes, Leviathan, 110–11.
10. J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, vols. 7 and 8 in Collected Works, 8:841.
11. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, 112–13.
12. H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 175–91.
13. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 289 (II, ii, 6).
14. Ibid., 318 (II, v, 47).
15. Ibid., 188–89 (I, iv, 42–43).
16. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 175–76.
17. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 259.
18. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2:208.
19. Ibid., 233.
20. A. Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London: Macmillan, 1970), 213–30.
21. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2:233.
22. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, 119–22.
23. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 219.
24. James Mill, An Essay on Government (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 48–49.
25. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, 109.
26. Ibid., 122.
27. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 213ff.
28. H. Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 147–48.
29. A. A. Berle and G. C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 293ff.
30. F. H. Lawson, The Law of Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 59ff.
31. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 75–76.
32. Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings, 147.
33. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government (London: Dent, 1914), 157–59.
34. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 206.
35. Locke, Two Treatises on Government, 306 (II, v, 28).
36. Lawson, Law of Property, 98.
37. J. P. Day, “Locke on Property,” Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1966): 207–21.
38. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 40–41.
39. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2:214ff.
40. R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 78–79.
41. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 52–54.
42. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, 202–3.
43. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 157.
44. V. Haksar, Liberty, Equality, and Perfectionism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 253–55.
45. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 158.
46. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2:233.
47. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 11.
48. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 3:800ff.
49. Ibid., 2:222–14.
50. J. S. Mill, Essays on Economics and Society, vols. 4 and 5 in Collected Works, 5:463–98.
51. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 3:758–96.
52. J. S. Mill, Essays on Economics and Society, 5:749–52.
53. J. Harris, “The Survival Lottery,” Philosophy 50 (1975): 81–87.
54. P. Singer, “Utility and the Survival Lottery,” Philosophy 52 (1977): 218–20.
55. Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings, 136.
56. J. Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
1. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959), 254.
2. I. Jarvie, Concepts and Society (London, 1972), chap. 1.
3. G. C. Homans, The Nature of Social Science (New York, 1967).
4. S. F. Nadel, The Theory of Social Structure (London, 1957), 20ff.
5. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 573ff.
6. Cf. S. M. Lyman and M. B. Scott, The Drama of Social Reality (New York, 1975), and R. Harré and P. F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behaviour (Oxford, 1972).
7. E. Goffman, Encounters (New York, 1961), chap. 3.
8. A. de Saint-Exupéry, Sand, Sea and Stars (Harmondsworth, 1966), 25.
9. A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957), 261ff.
10. Cf. A. Heath, “The Rational Model of Man,” European Journal of Sociology 15 (1974): 200ff.
11. J.W.N. Watkins, “Imperfect Rationality,” in Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, ed. R. Borger and F. Cioffi, 172–79 (Cambridge, 1970).
12. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth, 1965), 18–38.
13. I. Jarvie and J. Agassi, “The Problem of the Rationality of Magic,” in Rationality, ed. B. R. Wilson, 173 (Oxford, 1970).
14. Downs, Economic Theory of Democracy, 29n.
15. B. M. Barry, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (London, 1970), 45ff.
16. Ibid., 17–18.
17. T. B. Macaulay, “Mill on Government,” in Works (Edinburgh, 1902 [reprint]), 7:354.
18. Goffman, Frame Analysis, chap. 5.
19. Ibid., 362–63.
20. M. Banton, Roles (London, 1965).
21. Lyman and Scott, The Drama of Social Reality, 168n1.
22. Ibid., 102.
23. J. D. Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide (Princeton, 1967), 315ff.
24. Lyman and Scott, Drama of Social Reality, 66–67.
25. Ibid., chap. 2.
26. D. Richards, A Theory of Reasons for Action (Oxford, 1971), 3–71.
27. It is impossible to do very much to take advantage of the discussion that the paper received. The main point to make is, perhaps, that not only Goffman’s work but also Goffman himself resists both the attempt to erect a general theory on the basis of his observations and any further attempt to draw strenuous morals from them. It appears that the only general moral to which Goffman might be willing to subscribe is that social life is very much more intricate than the naked eye tends to notice, and that we employ a remarkable range of communicative skills, and rely on all sorts of hidden communicative conventions, to facilitate even the most everyday activities. There are gestures that the man standing on the curb employs to signal his intentions to car drivers; there are hosts of gestures that pedestrians in a busy street employ not to collide with one another, to keep each other in invisible lanes—invisible to the pedestrian, but detectable by careful plotting. The suggestion that some of us had thought we detected in Encounters and elsewhere, to the effect that social life is hard and emotionally wearing work, is not part of Goffman’s case. There is a great deal of busy work, but not in any plausible sense hard work.
This suggests that the information-transmitting aspect of behavior is, indeed, the central aspect of the argument. In this case, the idea that “dramatic” explanations are parasitic on other sorts of explanation is reinforced, for what a drama turns out to be is a particular mode of telling a story. The story itself must, presumably, have a coherence of its own already that is, in principle at least, there to be elicited before the dramatization occurs. But we are still left with the question with which the paper ended—a question that, of course, is one that literary theorists have wrestled with for ages—namely, what makes a particular form of presentation uniquely or specially apt for transmitting a given sort of information, and why should expressing it in this way satisfy individuals’ desire to learn, or remind themselves of, truths about themselves? Whether this is a question for sociological theorists, I do not know.
1. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1942), sec. 207.
2. See Alan Ryan, “Two Concepts of Politics and Democracy: James and John Stuart Mill,” in Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, ed. Martin Fleisher, 76-113 (New York, Croom Helm, 1972).
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, Andrew Crooke, 1651), chap. 6; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), bk. 2.
4. J. P. Day, “Locke on Property,” Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1966): 207–21.
5. Jeremy Bentham, The Theory of Legislation, ed. by C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1931), 201ff.
6. A. M. Honoré, “Ownership,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, ed. A. G. Guest, 107–47 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961).
7. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, 109–23.
8. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 219.
9. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. by K. Codell Carter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 236.
10. K. Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, in Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 3:299–301.
11. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, addition 26 to sec. 44.
12. W. Hastie, Kant’s Philosophy of Law (Edinburgh: Black, 1887), 81–84.
13. Ibid., 108–13, 237–38.
14. H. Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 43–45.
15. Ibid., 45–46.
16. Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, 3:332–33.
17. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, sec. 44.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., sec. 57 and addition.
20. Ibid., sec. 197 and addition.
21. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 139ff.
22. K. Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 3:100–1.
23. Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, 3:306ff.
24. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 193.
25. In essence, this is to say that such notions as that of “self-expression” are indefinitely contestable; see W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” chap. 8 of Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964).
1. I am indebted for discussion to Onora O’Neill, Stephen Clark, and the other participants at the Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference in Belfast, also to Steven Lukes, Jenifer Hochschild, and Jim Griffin, and to the Balliol Cerberus Society and the Politics Department at Princeton University. From the vast literature on all aspects of Marx and Marxism I would single out as particularly helpful the studies by Buchanan (1982), Elster (1985), Roemer (1982, 1986), Lukes (1985), and Wood (1981).
1. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 158ff.
2. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965), 765–69.
3. Peter Archer, “The Constitution,” in Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, ed. Ben Pimlott (London: Heinemann, 1984).
4. Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Social Reconstruction (London: Allen and Unwin, 1916), 100ff.
5. F. H. Lawson makes it clear that many of the powers of owners in developed legal systems are inventions; societies in which they did not exist are not just conceivable—such powers did not exist in an earlier England (The Law of Property [Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1958]).
6. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118ff.
7. Ibid., 131ff.
8. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (London: Dent, 1912), 72.
9. Hannah Arendt, “What Was Freedom,” in Between Past and Future (London: Faber, 1961), interestingly and perceptively discussed by Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (London: Methuen, 1977), 72–79.
10. See Alan Ryan, “Utility and Ownership,” in Utility and Rights, ed. Raymond Frey, 175–95 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); reprinted as chapter 29 in the present volume.
11. Anne Phillips, “Fraternity,” in Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, ed. Ben Pimlott, 230–41 (London: Heinemann, 1984).
12. C. B. Macpherson defends a version of negative liberty (“counterextractive” liberty) that implies that capitalist property relations systematically deprive the worker of his freedom; but I think that this is to win one’s case by a definitional maneuver (“Berlin’s Divisions of Liberty,” in Democratic Theory, 117ff. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973]).
13. J. Bentham, Theory of Legislation (London: Trubner, French, 1883), 94.
14. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 73.
15. A. M. Honoré, “Ownership,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, ed. A. G. Guest, 107ff. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
16. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, 94ff.
17. Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983).
18. G. A. Cohen, “Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: How Patterns Preserve Liberty,” Erkenntnis 11 (1977): 5–23.
19. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Revolutions of 1848 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 70; J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 158ff.
20. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Myth of Human Self-Identity,” in The Socialist Idea, ed. Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire, 25ff. (London: Quartet, 1977).
21. Nozick supposes that “capitalist acts between consenting adults” would have to be forbidden if capitalism is not to reemerge (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 162–63).
22. Peter Kellner, “Are Markets Compatible with Socialism,” in Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, ed. Ben Pimlott, 146–56 (London: Heinemann, 1984).
23. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Robertson, 1983), 17–20.
24. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981), contains some strange ideas about the connections between sexuality and capitalism, but is properly obsessed by entrepreneurial energy.
25. J. K. Galbraith discusses this myth at some length in The Anatomy of Power (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984).
26. Michael Walzer, Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 128–38.
27. Oddly, Raymond Plant’s The Market, Equality, and the State (London: Fabian Society, 1984), hardly touches on this issue of liberty for the worse off.
28. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 60ff.